


feed me all thy treacheries & I'll spit blood when morrow comes

by Vivian



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: 18th/19th century, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dark, Dysfunctional Family, M/M, Sexual Tension, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 17:43:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2516327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vivian/pseuds/Vivian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thranduil turns his son against his will. Legolas wakes to his new life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	feed me all thy treacheries & I'll spit blood when morrow comes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Angelas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Angelas/gifts).



> Ok guys, this is actually a fanfiction of a fanfiction. Namely from Angelas. We talked about her project of a 19th century vamp AU and I fell head over heels for the story and the character dynamics so I asked if it'd be OK to write a fanfic to that story. So this is what I did. I hope you all like it. Check out Angelas story as soon as it is out!

 

 **I.** **Abenddämmerung**

 

 He wakes from blackness to the terror of existence.

He can not breath. He can not think. He _is_.

 

His fingers slide over silken sheets, the cloth is old, brittle underneath his fingertips. There's a coldness enamoured with his heart. For a moment he believes it might not beat, and for another he thinks it should not. Bereft of silence he listens to his own breathing. Where is he knows not and only slowly his memories unfurl with every more breath he takes. Too eager are his lungs for air, too rash is the hammering in his breast. Yet bloodless seems his skin, his hands so sharply cut and pale like the first breath of winter.

Legolas hauls himself up, totters towards the window. The glass seems thick, dust fragments scattered on the surface. Behind it lies a pale moon in a dark-blue sky above the vast blackness of the sea. Rough and jagged crags on the shore. With his hands against the glass, he but stands there and does not comprehend. A place like this he has not seen and there is something, something scratching behind his eyelids. Some memory he must not loose.

He turns around again, then falters—nausea retches his guts. He sinks to his knees. He can feel his eyes roll back in his skull.

Hunger strikes him down. A hunger that gnaws on his flesh and with its etching tongue sucks on the marrow of his bones. So he lies writhing on the floor, dust smearing into his hair, and leaving grey smudges on his bare skin. Choking he tries to claw his hands into his stomach. And he prays for death for the first time.

 

He does not know how long his limbs twist and twitch on the cold floor. He does not feel how his skin tears underneath his own fingernails. There is no blood to be a witness to his deeds, just shreds of torn flesh. His muscles feel broken, his nerves raw. It is then that his door opens and he would not have noticed had he not lain facing it. Ivory feet, a heavy brocade robe, frayed at the seam. Then pale, champaign-coloured hair as someone bends down to him. Carefully he is pulled up to sit, long, marble white arms wrap around his waist.

“Hush,” says the voice. It is his father's. He feels his father's warmth behind his naked body, dousing him like hot wax a snowflake. Yet his hunger is not stilled, only murmured to slumber by his father's lips against his cheek. Then they are gone and he hears a wet, low, tearing sound. The scent of copper fills the air, so rich and full and he thinks of his mother's womb, of breathlessness and warm darkness. The next moment his father presses his wrist against his mouth. The skin is broken and thick silken drops soak out of his damaged veins. Legolas' eyes flutter shut and he sucks. He thinks of his mother's milky white breast and feels his father's kiss on his temple. He drinks and he knows it is not the first time.

“Enough now,” his father says, as he pulls his wrist free. Legolas moves forward, tries to catch it once more. “I said enough,” his father repeats, a splinter of ice in his voice.

An image jolts through his head. His mother. Eyes wide. Her face spattered with red.

“What have you done?” he asks shaking.

The curve of her neck, split in half by the fine line, the cut that opened her throat. Still he feels his father's breath on his cheek.

“Nothing unforgivable.”

 

 

  **II. Nacht**

 

 Legolas has made a truce with the black crags. They whisper fairy tales in his ears at night. Their murmur is of gentle silence and engulfing abysses. When he opens his window he can taste salt on the tip of his tongue, can hear the surging waves roll against the shore and crash and tumble over the cold, sharp rocks. The cries of seagulls fill his heart with something he has not known before. It is a rising sickness, an addiction for yearning that he can not shake. He wants to weep, but his cheeks stay dry. Maybe he can not weep any longer. Maybe he is not worthy of his own tears.

A smile splits his lips. No, he is truly is not.

The first night his father had held him in his arms. And his treacherous body had been craving for his warmth and touch. As it always had.

 

He finds himself wandering through the castle. The walls are of dark, roughly cut stone upon which hang faded tapestries. There are no candles, only the moonlight to guide his steps but not once does he stumble or fall. Many a time he has tried to open a door and found it locked. He breaths in the dust from centuries of emptiness. As if one day the castle had been abandoned and no one had dared to go in afterwards. It stinks of rotten nobleness, the pages of books he picks up turn to dust in his hands. A broken fragment of a page here or there with a faint scribble of a long-dead man's hand. The language is close enough to his own to be recognised, but too different to be understood.

The front gates are locked, the windows to the balconies, too and all windows facing the East are nailed shut. Legolas feels like suffocating. Only the small windows he can open, those through which he could not climb. The night outside smiles at him, her invitation is not subtle, it is the stretch of the ocean, the breath of the sea.

 

Thranduil finds him every second or third day when the hunger brings him to his knees. Then he cradles Legolas' head in one arm and feeds him with the fresh blood in the veins of his other. He tries not to think of it, but every gulp he takes, every ounce he swallows gives him the strength for shame. For guilt so bone-deep embedded that it twists itself into the very fabric of his being.

And for something else, too. He can not bear to look upon his father. Can not bear to even call him that, father. He becomes Thranduil with every passing hour. He becomes many things more as the days turn to weeks and the weeks turn to months.

 

He tries to find Thranduil's keys, but he fails. In his smile he can read what he truly is now, the slant of his high cheekbones, the strong line of his eyebrows and in all his gestures too—the way he inclines his head and waves his hand. He can not escape this castle.

 

The ripped bed sheet feels brittle underneath his fingertips, but the knot is strong enough. As is the thick iron chain holding the chandelier. Carefully he balances himself on the old chair and swings his rope over the hook on which the chandelier hangs.

 

When Thranduil finds him, he is still choking, arms hanging limply on his sides, feet trashing. He has been praying for ten hours. But death denies him.

The purple lines on his neck prickle underneath Thranduil's fingertips when Thranduil pushes him against the wall, the rope now hanging loosely around his neck. Thranduil's eyes are wide, the blue of his iris so clear it hurts to look at.

“So you want to die,” he hisses. Legolas does not answer. “I do not allow it, you ungrateful, madness-stricken child!” He bends down to him, Legolas can feel his breath against his lips.

“You belong to me now.”

 

 

**III. Morgenröte**

 

Legolas wakes to a midnight-blue melody. He has heard it many a time in his sleep and it still tastes the same. It smells of childhood insomnia and restless nightmares. Its touch is that of an airy, luminous fey, nothing but a whisper against his soul if only he possesses one. It leaves traces in the air, an old perfume, the smell of his bed-cloth, of the air that comes through the open window and his mother's hair and neck.

He rises without thought and follows the melody. It leads him through the maze of rooms that open up to other rooms, through corridors an over stairwells until at last he finds him. Thranduil's back is straight, covered by the spill of his hip long hair, so fair in his posture, the movement of his fingers on the piano so graceful. Yet if it were not for the melody—what satisfaction it would bring to break his long, delicate fingers.

What a treasure, what a curse to hear this song again. Legolas closes his eyes. Listens. It is hard to breath when his breast feels so tight, when a thick and dry sob tries to climb up his throat. But he stays silent until finally his father … until Thranduil finishes.

Then Thranduil turns around to him, his face so soft in the light of the dying candle flame. Shadows move about his face, smooth as cream. They soften all the angles, blur and smooth what speaks of violence in his features.

“Come here,” he calls. Legolas obeys. Thranduil gestures next to him an Legolas sits down. They are close now. Both their bodies cold, hunger just a breath away. Thranduil takes his hands and lays them on the keyboard, then he lays his own on top of Legolas' and starts the melody anew.

 

The song clads him in heaviness, as if his clothes were soaked with cold sea-water. But he continues playing the following night and the one after that and the one after that. Always till morrow is nigh. But until then he plays and Thranduil either next to him or behind him to lay both his hands above his. Legolas plays with his eyes closed for he can not bear to see but a strand of Thranduil's hair or his hands with his jewelled fingers, not when he thinks of his mother with every breath he takes.

Her face fades behinds his eyelids. With every passing night a little more.

 

“You think I love you,” Legolas whispers when Thranduil's lips brush his temple, he stands behind him while Legolas plays. He lifts his fingers from the keys, the touch of Thranduil a searing poison on his skin.

“And do you not?” Thranduil asks, and he lifts Legolas' hair from his neck to set a kiss upon it.

Legolas shudders.

“Think what you will,” he says quietly and turns around. He looks up into Thranduil's eyes.

“But you should know that when you least expect it, I _will_ betray you.”

 

The nights pass them by and Legolas waits; for what he does not know. There is a murmur in his heart, a coldness he is enamoured with. At some nights he claws his fingers into the windows facing the East and tries to pull out the nails one by one. Until his fingers are torn open or Thranduil hauls him back. He must not perish, Thranduil tells him then. And it is true, he must not, not yet.

 

He dreams of the sunrise. Clouds like towers in the sky, awaiting to be drowned in flames. Morrow approaches with oranges and rosy-reds seeping over the horizon as a harbinger of wrath. Then he ascends the steps of the East. He frames the clouds with an orange-white burning seam and breaks the sky in half. The sun, oh he is his terrible god with a smile full of flames. He is merciless in his reign as the monarch of the earth, his sceptre is a whip made of all the raging fires of hell.

And amidst the sunrise Legolas stretches his arms to the heavens, his head thrown back and laughing he receives all the blessings of his eternal damnation.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd be delighted if you tell me what you think! <3


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